My Daddy Drives a UFO….The Official Launch of Solar System Blues

Solar System Blues began as a spoken-word element of a band show for The Fest, a music and arts festival that my brother and his friends used to put on in Lancaster, PA every July. It’s the first thing I consciously created a First Draft for, and circulated said draft for comments from friends and family. That was back in 2009, and I’ve futzed and tinkered with it ever since.

To the particulars: the story is set in the late 22nd century, in a dystopian/cyperpunk future, when six or seven leviathan superstates battle for dominance with terrifiying weapons. One wounded soldier of these wars, employed on a secret project to enable humanity to survive nuclear war, instead steals the ship, and with a self-aware computer, a store of frozen genetic material, and a teenage first mate born in space, goes in search of a new planet for humanity to live on. Everything goes according to plan, except for what doesn’t.

For me, this book is less about future shock and more about human community: how it is destroyed, and how it can be restored. Is it really possible for humanity to have a mulligan? Or would we just make the same mistakes under different stars?